Historian Maurice Isserman claimed that “when the Johnson administration marched off to wage its newly declared war on the domestic front, it was not so much against poverty as against ‘the culture of poverty’” (Isserman Reference Isserman2000, 214). Anthropologist Oscar Lewis coined the concept of a culture of poverty in 1955 when studying poor families in Mexico (Lewis Reference Lewis1955). He proposed that some poor people in capitalist economies form a separate subculture which not only lacks money but also has an alternative way of life “with some seventy interrelated social, economic, and psychological traits” (Lewis 1966/Reference Lewis, Gmelch, Kemper and Zenner2009, 176). Traits such as lack of impulse control, present-time orientation, inability to plan, and fatalism prevented the poor from seizing economic opportunities to escape poverty (Lewis 1966/Reference Lewis, Gmelch, Kemper and Zenner2009). Many have argued that Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action embodied the key parts of this line of thinking, applying the “culture of poverty” to African Americans and blaming the victims for their own poverty (Weiner Reference Weiner2015; Novick Reference Novick1988; Allitt Reference Allitt, Agnew and Rosenzweig2006). Historian Michael Katz argued: “The angry protest following Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Reference Moynihan1965 report…helped bury both the culture of poverty and the black family as acceptable topics in liberal social science” (Katz Reference Katz2013, 151). With liberals in retreat, conservatives such as Charles Murray and Ronald Reagan proposed that it was the governmental programs that created a culture of poverty, dependent underclass, and unstable families among the poor (Murray Reference Murray1984; Orleck Reference Orleck, Orleck and Hazirjian2011). Their theories dominated the 1970s and 1980s and continue to have influence in the twenty-first century (O’Connor Reference O’Connor2007; Katz Reference Katz2013; Edin and Shaefer Reference Edin and Luke Shaefer2015). By the late 1980s, liberal theorists such as sociologist William Julius Wilson returned to discussing the culture of poverty, explaining its origins in the structure of the economy and not in governmental programs.

In fact, Moynihan’s Report should be understood as the intellectual foundation of modern liberal theory explaining poverty—not as an encumbrance that liberals had to overcome. His argument that the structure of the American economy had implications for poor people’s behavior and family life continues to influence modern liberals studying the relationship between structure and cultural behavior (Wilson Reference Wilson and Liebow2003; Massey Reference Massey2007; Small, Harding, and Lamont Reference Small, Harding and Lamont2010). Moynihan did not—and modern liberal social scientists do not—view the actual culture of poor people pejoratively, seeing it rather as a product of history than as a pathology.

Many, if not most, people who currently write about poverty in America anchor their narratives in the 1960s (Goldstein Reference Goldstein2012; Handler and Hasenfeld Reference Handler and Hasenfeld2007; Katz Reference Katz2013; Massey Reference Massey2007; Murray Reference Murray1984; Wilson Reference Wilson1987). Narratives explaining later poverty conceptualize the 1960s as the time when either generous governmental programs created millions of dependent people or a worthy governmental effort folded under conservative criticism. In Social Science for What? historian Alice O’Connor lamented that conservatives have created a useable past to justify their policies while liberals lacked a convincing, coherent narrative of poverty in the past. She claimed that conservatives such as Murray, Allan Bloom, and Dinesh D’Souza provided:

The conservative narrative blamed an expanded federal government, alleged a loss of morality among the young, and claimed a liberal assault on traditional American values. It boosted limited government instead of federal programs, moralizing about behavior over understanding it, free-market policies rather than community action, and individualism over common solutions (O’Connor Reference O’Connor2007).

The liberal narrative that started in the 1960s, by contrast, featured a changing American economy in which powerful people kept their status at the expense of the poor and vulnerable. It saw a shifting capitalist economy often leaving workers without jobs and money. Powerless to change the system, poor people adopted a culture of survival with features that limited future opportunities. Although its most prominent exponents changed, the same view has prevailed since at least the 1960s. Moynihan contributed to this useable liberal narrative of poverty and the past, its influence continuing even into the twenty-first century (Wilson Reference Wilson2009).

Moynihan’s report appeared in 1965 when attention to the War on Poverty (1964–1980) was intense (Orleck Reference Orleck, Orleck and Hazirjian2011). The President’s Task Force in the War against Poverty, headed by Sargent Shriver, had just drafted the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (EOA). Congress passed it, authorizing the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and its programs including Job Corps and Community Action Program. According to historian Gareth Davies, the liberals shaping this law showed a traditional New Deal liberal belief that opening opportunities within a fair economic system would let individuals work their way out of poverty, reducing the need for welfare programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) (Davies Reference Davies1992). The optimistic liberals of 1964, Davies notes, thought that “once the Economic Opportunity Act had provided the necessary tools for self-advancement, the structure of the national economy would permit the deserving poor to prosper” (Davies Reference Davies1992, 218). Especially because a surge in the number of jobs was expected due to the $11.5 billion tax cut of February 1964, poor people with education and job training through the War on Poverty would find jobs and start their way toward affluence (Davies Reference Davies1992, 212). The federal government could minimize the amplitude of boom-and-bust cycles in the political economy, train the poor to get jobs, and stabilize lower-class families. They made no distinction between the needs of African Americans and whites (Davies Reference Davies1992, 223).

Despite such optimism, the “paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty” mentioned in the EOA’s Declaration of Purpose proved tenacious (Public Law 88-452 1964, 1). In his report, Moynihan tried to explain why African Americans remained in poverty and why the legislation and fair economic structure may not accurately reflect the reality of African Americans’ experience. Moynihan seemed to confirm that African Americans lived in a “culture of poverty,” writing that they lived in a “tangle of pathology [that] is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world” (Moynihan Reference Moynihan1965, 47). His most attention-grabbing lines specifically accused the African-American family of perpetuating it. He claimed that “at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time” (Moynihan Reference Moynihan1965, 3). Moynihan depended on the US Census of 1960, which showed that one-fourth of non-white families were headed by women and the number of non-white children born to unmarried parents was eight times that of whites (Moynihan Reference Moynihan1965, 9–11). Even as the economy improved, the marriage rate among African Americans remained low and illegitimate births remained high, and Moynihan came to deny that economic problems caused instability and weakness in the African-American family. As he saw it now, the weakened family perpetuated itself.

Although Moynihan did say that the pathology reproduced itself, Wilson has noted that focusing on this alone ignores “Moynihan’s careful attention to structural causes in inequality” (Wilson Reference Wilson and Liebow2003, 96). The entire third chapter of The Negro Family deals with larger structural issues responsible for the breakup of African-American families, notably, the continuing impact from slavery, Reconstruction, urbanization, unemployment and poverty, the wage system, and population growth (Moynihan Reference Moynihan1965, 15). The “culture of poverty” did not appear in the 1960s and perpetuate along family lines. It had a long history shaped by economic, political, and social forces beyond the African-American community.

Moynihan used migration, urbanization, and unemployment to support his argument that the larger economic structure created a problematic African American social environment. He borrowed from E. Franklin Frazier, an African-American sociologist who was part of the “Chicago School.” In The Negro Family, published in 1939, Frazier argued that African Americans had gone through continuous disorganization and reorganization since slavery (Frazier Reference Frazier1939), claiming that it was still happening in Northern cities. African Americans moved to Northern cities from Southern farms, thus needing to learn new skills and customs in a foreign environment. Yet, while learning the ways of the city, men and women experienced joblessness, delinquency, vice, and family instability (O’Connor 2001, 81–82). Moynihan approvingly quoted Frazier’s book at length in his report (Moynihan Reference Moynihan1965, 18). Moynihan argued that the sudden Great Migration of African Americans northward in search of jobs disrupted family stability (Moynihan Reference Moynihan1965, 17). He noted that “in every index of family pathology—divorce, separation, and desertion, female family head, children in broken homes, and illegitimacy—the contrast between the urban and rural environment for Negro families is unmistakable” (Moynihan Reference Moynihan1965, 18). The rapid influx of people into cities pushed the population up faster than jobs could be created or sustained. The jobless fell into poverty and committed crimes, their children took part in juvenile delinquency, and their despair of finding work often led families to break up.

Moynihan noticed that, even with work opportunities, discrimination caused African-American men to suffer from unemployment far longer than did their white counterparts. He noted that “work is precisely the one thing the Negro family head in such circumstances has not received over the past generation….The fundamental, overwhelming fact is that Negro unemployment…has continued at disaster levels for 35 years” (Moynihan Reference Moynihan1965, 19). Moynihan read the statistics as showing that employment correlated strongly with family stability. Unemployment among African-American men peaked about one year before their families broke apart. He asserted that “the conclusion from these and similar data is difficult to avoid: during times when jobs were reasonably plentiful…the Negro family became stronger and more stable. As jobs became more and more difficult to find, the stability of the family became more and more difficult to maintain” (Moynihan Reference Moynihan1965, 21). Jobs, he argued, should be the focus of all anti-poverty policies (Moynihan Reference Moynihan and Moynihan1968, 10).

Moynihan’s discussion of unemployment garnered little attention compared to his lines about a tangle of pathology. However, others liberal social scientists in the 1960s and early 1970s shared Moynihan’s emphasis on the structure of the economy as shaping both culture and family structure among the poor. The easy optimism of earlier liberal thinking was thus challenged by liberals who claimed to see a fundamentally flawed system, distinct African-American experience, and need to consider poor people on their own terms (Davies Reference Davies1992, 218; Rodman Reference Rodman1963; Clark Reference Clark1965; Liebow Reference Liebow1967; Rainwater Reference Rainwater1970; Stack Reference Stack1974).

John Kenneth Galbraith, an economist and designer of the War on Poverty, also argued that both economic conditions and cultural values created poverty. In The Affluent Society, Galbraith argued that economists up to the 1950s had assumed that poverty and inequality occurred naturally (Galbraith Reference Galbraith1997). Poor people had always outnumbered the rich in human history. However, America’s affluence in the 1950s upset this “conventional wisdom.” Now, affluence was the norm and poverty the exception. According to Galbraith, this embodied a new kind of poverty (Galbraith Reference Galbraith1997, 235).

Galbraith accepted that special traits could cause poverty but insisted that the structure of the economy could do so, too. The two types were case poverty and insular poverty. He noted: “Case poverty is the poor farm family with the junk-filled yard and the dirty children playing in the bare dirt….Case poverty is commonly and properly related to some characteristic of the individuals so afflicted” (Galbraith Reference Galbraith1997, 236). It ostensibly resulted from “mental deficiency, bad health, inability to adapt to the discipline of industrial life, uncontrollable procreation, alcohol, discrimination involving a very limited minority, some educational handicap unrelated to community shortcoming” (Galbraith Reference Galbraith1997, 236). By contrast, some people suffered on “islands of poverty” in urban slums or rural expanses. There, Galbraith said, “everyone or nearly everyone is poor. Here, evidently, it is not easy to explain matters by individual inadequacy” (Galbraith Reference Galbraith1997, 236). Some common factor in the environment must deprive the community of economic well-being. Galbraith proposed that race might be the issue, minority people being pushed into communities without jobs, such as Harlem or the Bronx. Subpar schools might also frustrate an entire community’s chance of success, as in Appalachia (Galbraith Reference Galbraith1997, 238). In short, a specific lack of social resources and fairness in the national economy were at work, not an absolute scarcity of resources or ability.

Sociologists whom Galbraith knew who helped design the War on Poverty included Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin. Both insisted that the existing economic structure produced a subculture of delinquency and poverty. In Delinquency and Opportunity, they argued that industrial society created the possibility of limitless social rewards such as money, power, and prestige (Cloward and Ohlin Reference Cloward and Ohlin1960, 79). Youth from all classes strived for these opportunities, but some faced barriers. “The aspiration to be a physician is hardly enough to explain the fact of becoming a physician,” Cloward and Ohlin said; “there is much that transpires between the aspiration and the achievement” (Cloward and Ohlin Reference Cloward and Ohlin1960, 145–146). Degrees leading to white-collar jobs took time and money, a luxury beyond the poor. More, the poor discovered that success depended on having the proper race, religion, speech mannerisms, familial ties, and professional connections. The sociologists argued: “For delinquency is not, in the final analysis, a property of individuals or even of subcultures; it is a property of the social systems in which these individuals and groups are enmeshed. The pressures that produce delinquency originate in these structures, as do the forces that shape the content of specialized subcultural adaptations” (Cloward and Ohlin Reference Cloward and Ohlin1960, 210–211). In short, the structure itself was unfair, setting cultural expectations which further hurt poor people’s chances of escaping poverty.

Others in the liberal scene of the 1960s and early 1970s emphasized the structural origins of poverty and its influence on behavior. Anthropologists Elliot Liebow and Carol Stack sought to reveal the inner workings of African Americans in low socio-economic communities (Liebow Reference Liebow1967; Stack Reference Stack1974). Both came to the same essential insight—that joblessness among African-American men led the African-American community to form kinship networks of reciprocal favors in order to survive. Psychologist Kenneth Clark, in Dark Ghetto, argued: “Few look at the causes of the vicious cycle, which lie in the white community—the low-paying menial jobs unskilled Negroes are compelled to take; the chronic rising Negro unemployment rate, the poor education of Negro children; the compulsive bargain selling of property” (Clark Reference Clark1965, 48). He asserted that “the invisible wall is opaque from outside it” (Clark Reference Clark1965, 19). Lee Rainwater, in Behind Ghetto Walls, maintained that “the disadvantages Negroes suffer lies squarely upon the white caste which derives economic and psychic benefits from the operation of the system” (Rainwater Reference Rainwater1970, 3). Despite the distinctive features in their various studies, the fundamental insight that economic problems produced by an unfair structure forcing poor people to alternative (and damaging) cultural values brought Liebow, Stack, Clark, Rainwater, Moynihan, Galbraith, Cloward, and Ohlin into agreement. Even with their varying emphases on juvenile delinquents, poor whites, or African-American families, all understood the economic structure and cultural values as combining to keep poor people poor. Unlike the optimistic liberals who wrote the EOA in 1964, all thought that opening opportunities for men to work their way out of poverty and bring stability to families was impossible without altering some aspect of the structure of the economy. This led Moynihan as assistant secretary of President Richard Nixon’s Urban Affairs Council to propose a system guaranteeing an annual income to all Americans (Schulman Reference Schulman2001, 33). In August 1969, Nixon proposed the Family Assistance Plan (FAP) in a speech to the nation (Schulman Reference Schulman2001, 32). FAP passed the House (233 to 155) but failed to pass the Senate when Democrats found its levels too low and Republicans argued it would burden the federal budget.

The ascendency of conservative politicians and social commentators during the 1970s and 1980s shaped the public perception of poverty. Reagan proclaimed in his State of the Union Address in 1988: “My friends, some years ago, the Federal Government declared war on poverty, and poverty won” (Orleck Reference Orleck, Orleck and Hazirjian2011, 437). Reagan relied on advisers such as Murray, who in Losing Ground argued that people avoided work and immorally tried to escape responsibility for their actions. According to Barbara Ehrenreich, Murray argued that “poverty was caused not by low wages or a lack of jobs but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to defer gratification or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money” (Ehrenreich Reference Ehrenreich2012, 1). Murray blamed governmental programs such as AFDC for costing the taxpayers millions of dollars, giving money to the poor, and lacking work requirements (Mattison Reference Mattison1985, 90-91). He argued that problematic cultural traits of the poor stemmed from generous governmental programs rather than from discrimination, scarcity of jobs, poor social services, or absence of opportunity.

In the 1980s liberals returned to the narrative created in the 1960s. Starting with The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson argued that the poor remained poor due to social structure and the cultural behaviors it created. Social structure included “stereotyping, stigmatization, discrimination in hiring, job promotions, housing, and admission to educational institutions,” and culture included “the sharing of outlooks and modes of behavior among individuals who face similar place-based circumstances” (Wilson Reference Wilson2009, 4). Wilson noted that, after Moynihan’s death, “I was quoted as saying that the Moynihan report is an important and prophetic document. I still stand by that statement…because Moynihan’s predictions about the fragmentation of the African American family and its connection to inner-city poverty were largely borne out” (Wilson Reference Wilson2009, 96). Moreover, Moynihan’s “implicit cultural argument on the impact of black family fragmentation, which many would associate with the culture of poverty, is, to repeat, part of a complex thesis on the black family that combines structural and cultural factors” (Wilson Reference Wilson2009, 111). Wilson clearly expressed how other late-1960s liberals had influenced his own work in introductions he wrote for new editions of major books on poverty from the second half of the 1960s, including Liebow’s Tally’s Corner and Clark’s Dark Ghetto (Clark 1989; Liebow 2003). Wilson also influenced many others. In 2010, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science published an issue with articles by Wilson and fellow social scientists who argued that both the structure of the economy and the cultural values of the poor reinforced poverty (Small, Harding, and Lamont Reference Small, Harding and Lamont2010). In the introduction to the series, sociologists Mario Luis Small, David Harding, and Michèle Lamont declared: “Culture is back on the poverty research agenda” (Small, Harding, and Lamont Reference Small, Harding and Lamont2010, 6). Contributors examined how social structure and cultural scripts combined to shape poor people’s academic performance, child-rearing style, involvement in the community, family stability, and even sexual behavior (Fosse Reference Fosse2010; Vaisey Reference Vaisey2010; Waller Reference Waller2010).

The liberal tradition pairing structure and culture is anchored in liberals’ works written in the 1960s. Liberals such as Moynihan always saw the cultural values of the poor as shaped by the larger social and economic structure. Joblessness produced a culture among the poor, and both continued to keep those people poor. This persistent explanation unified liberals’ works since the 1960s, offering an alternative to a conservative interpretation that relies on claims of the ineffectiveness of government and the apathy of poor people.